Scalable Graphene Defect Prediction Using Transferable Learning

Notably known for its extraordinary thermal and mechanical properties, graphene is a favorable building block in various cutting-edge technologies such as flexible electronics and supercapacitors. However, the almost inevitable existence of defects severely compromises the properties of graphene, and defect prediction is a difficult, yet important, task. Emerging machine learning approaches offer opportunities to predict target properties such as defect distribution by exploiting readily available data, without incurring much experimental cost. Most previous machine learning techniques require the size of training data and predicted material systems of interest to be identical. This limits their broader application, because in practice a newly encountered material system may have a different size compared with the previously observed ones. In this paper, we develop a transferable learning approach for graphene defect prediction, which can be used on graphene with various sizes or shapes not seen in the training data. The proposed approach employs logistic regression and utilizes data on local vibrational energy distributions of small graphene from molecular dynamics simulations, in the hopes that vibrational energy distributions can reflect local structural anomalies. The results show that our machine learning model, trained only with data on smaller graphene, can achieve up to 80% prediction accuracy of defects in larger graphene under different practical metrics. The present research sheds light on scalable graphene defect prediction and opens doors for data-driven defect detection for a broad range of two-dimensional materials.